Mass Killings Have Become Rorschach Tests - The California shooting is a peculiar one for the white-privilege crowd to have latched onto.

From Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review:

Onto the despicable act of a disturbed young man, entire worldviews are today being projected and confirmed. Over at Salon, a teacher of “Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies” named Brittney Cooper asked a question that she thought most germane:

How many times must troubled young white men engage in these terroristic acts that make public space unsafe for everyone before we admit that white male privilege kills?

The shooter, Cooper claimed at various points in what is an impressively self-serving little essay, was a “young white guy” who fed off of “heterosexual white male entitlement”; “a young, clean-cut white man” who was distraught at his inability to “access all the markers of white male heterosexual middle-class privilege”; a representative of “troubled young white men” whose philosophy was rooted in “white supremacy” and who serves an exemplar of both “pathological white masculinity” and “middle-class, heterosexual, white male rage”; and someone who was not only marinated in “racism, white supremacy and patriarchy” but coddled by “systems of whiteness and patriarchy [that] continue to produce white men who think like this.” “As long as America refuses to deal with its white male privilege problem,” Cooper concluded rather predictably, “we will continue to have” mass shootings.

It is unsurprising that Cooper would draw this conclusion. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like the Klan. Still, there is a tiny problem with her theory, and that is that it’s nonsense. Certainly, the claim that “usually, the young men who . . . shoot large numbers of people . . . are white, male, heterosexual and middle-class” is a popular one. Just this weekend, serial fabulist Michael Moore told his fans that “nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males.” Still, popular does not equal true. Shooters are invariably male, yes. But, racially, they are all over the map. As Salon’s own Andrew O’Hehir noted in 2012, “the stereotype that these kinds of shooters are invariably white men is less true than it used to be”:

In the last decade or so, almost every possible demographic has been represented: There have been two infamous campus shootings by Asian graduate students, one by a Native American teenager living on a Minnesota reservation, and a couple by African-Americans and Latinos. Overall, 43 of the 61 shooters in mass killings since 1982 have been white, which is only a little higher than the proportion of whites in the general population.

Actually, it’s a little lower.  And the FBI confirmed in 2010 that, despite the widespread belief to the contrary, “the racial diversification of serial killers generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population.” That is: White people commit mass shootings pretty much in line with their demographic representation. Is Cooper suggesting something has changed?

"Cooper misses something very important, the shooter was not white, but a person of mixed race. I am predicting soon that the shooter will be referred to as a "White Asian" similar to the way George Zimmerman was referred to as a "White Hispanic."